Fresh from controversy over a suspicious space-faring monkey, Iran is now under fire over a suspect stealth fighter jet breakthrough that one Australian defence analyst said “looks like it might make a noise and vibrate if you put 20 cents in”.

Unveiling the Qaher F313 (Dominant F313) earlier this month, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmedinejad described it as “among the most advanced fighter jets in the world” with features including the ability to evade detection by radar and hit both ground and air targets.

Aviation experts have questioned whether the jet shown can even fly as it was too small to accommodate a real pilot and the controls and wiring looked too simple.

It also lacked the bolts and rivets found on all aircraft and offered wonky aerodynamics.

“It looks like the Iranians dumped some rudimentary flight controls and an ejection seat into a shell moulded in what they thought were stealthy angles,” wrote Foreign Policy magazine.

Andrew Davies, senior defence analyst and director of research at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, said the jet was a “laughable fake”.

“It looks like it might make a noise and vibrate if you put 20 cents in,” he told Fairfax Media.

The monkey that changed appearance was laughable enough, but this takes the cake. You wonder if those in charge are morons, or just think everyone else is? Fourth formers could do better fakes!

“I can see (almost) how North Korea gets away with transparent nonsense due to isolation, but Iran has a population that’s much more switched on and connected, at least in the cities.

Hopefully it will lead to greater unrest amongst the population. People don’t like a Government that lies and turns their country into a laughing stock.

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This entry was posted on Friday, February 8th, 2013 at 9:00 am and is filed under International Politics.
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I remember getting a “FW: FW: fwd: FW: God bless America – R.I.P. rag heads!” type e mail in which some proud US citizen waxed lyrical about his nation’s military and technological supremacy, he’d seen a still photo from the movie Stealth of a futuristic U.S. jet fighter on the deck of a carrier (complete with Pilot Jessica Biel at the controls ) and thought it was real, and gotten a bit carried away with patriotic fervour.

The truly sad thing about this Iranian govt propaganda, is – that it’s not even as well done as this lunatic’s e mail faff was!

And Iran must know that the IDF would send over half a dozen hard dudes in F-16s to knock out any serious new military threat they to put up. (Unless Ahmedinejad is too young or not well-enough read to realise that?)

“among the most advanced fighter jets in the world” with features including the ability to evade detection by radar and hit both ground and air targets…..and it glows blue when Jews, Christians or western atheists are nearby.

“Although these are uncertain economic times, I believe we must show Iran that we can still put monkeys into space. In fact, we may even go back to the moon, to prove America can still do what it once did. The time has come to boldly go were we went before. Supposedly, most US research labs are retiring their chimps. Instead of sending them to animal sanctuaries, I propose blasting them into space.”

@tom, what – news articles written by hacks who wouldn’t know the first thing about military aircraft? You know they said the same thing about the F-15 & 16 during the same stage of their development and look how they’ve turned out. Hell I recall numerous articles about the Mig 29 being far superior to both when it showed up… What’s the kill-loss ratio on that one again?

By the way, I have seen many reports and much discussion of this Iranian “aircraft”, but cannot find a link anywhere so that I can see it for myself. I love the Aussie’s description of it, though, and really wanted to see what this toy looked like. Anyone have a link they can share?

No not really, it’s just that major breakthroughs in aviation tech always takes a shit load of time, money and set backs.
It’s just that it is all under the microscope now.

Absolute nonsense. If you knew anything about military aviation, you would know that both the F22 and F35 are expensive white elephants. The problems they have are unprecedented with a major US fighter aircraft, and its worse because the USAF has put all its eggs in these baskets.

The F 35 is a flying pig. It’s been designed to do too much and won’t do anything well. The F 22 is an expensive lemon that is not cost effective. It is weak in close range combat and was easily bested by the Eurofighter Typhoon in dogfights. Look it up yourself. The F-22 is a costly bet that it can keep enemies at long range. As anyone who has studied air combat knows, that is a futile expectation. The Americans themselves already know this with their experiences in Vietnam. The F 4 originally had no cannon, and had to get one sharpish in order to compete. In addition the damn thing won’t stay in the air without ridiculous amounts of maintenance and suffocates its own pilots. It’s a lemon.

I honestly don’t know what has happened to US aircraft design. They used to be awesome. But they’ve dropped the ball. Too much official meddling, I suspect.

Tom Jackson (295) Says: ” I honestly don’t know what has happened to US aircraft design. They used to be awesome. But they’ve dropped the ball. Too much official meddling, I suspect.”

The US ‘defence’ establishment works as a conduit through which public revenue (taxes) are channelled to private corporate ‘defence’ contractors. Producing effective ordnance is secondary to the requirement of providing the funds for high-tech engineering with an extremely expensive research and development component – not to mention the necessity to provide healthy profits to augment the share dividends those contractors return to their shareholders – and the downstream effects of a small portion of that research and development being converted to commercial products for sale into the civilian economy.

One of the primary reasons Germany and Japan became so industrially sophisticated at such a quick rate is precisely because those countries did not muck about providing private corporations massive R&D funds by channelling taxes through a resource hungry military complex, they provided funds directly to the corporate entities which appeared most likely to facilitate state aspirations in the field of high-tech R&D.